Xiao Bai - French Concession

Now Lin was looking at Ku expectantly, trustfully. All his muscles were tense, as if he were a hunting hound awaiting a command, or a coil spring that would bounce back as soon as Ku loosened his grip.

Ku screwed up his eyes and took a draw of his cigarette. He was fascinated by the restless passion of the young man in front of him. Strangely, he was not even discouraged by the threat of death.

It was time to announce the next operation. If this energy wasn’t channeled into an operation, it would explode. Allowing these young people to wait idly would be a recipe for disaster. They couldn’t be suppressed — they must be allowed to take action.

He had already been plotting his next operation, which would be even more visible than the last. It would be a defining moment for the cell and earn them lasting recognition and respect. People would remember it not as a headline in a few two-cent tabloid newspapers, immediately overshadowed by the next day’s news, but as a legend.

He began to spread the word via various channels. He allowed versions of the story to intersect, appear, and disappear. He did contact a few journalists, but his message was chiefly directed at the various powers operating in the Concession, and the armies of part-time informers who worked for them. He used the network to send a simple message: Ku is here.

Ku is here and to be reckoned with. Whatever your job is, even if it’s starting revolutions, people have to know who you are. He did not think of himself as having tricked these young people into joining him. They had a goal, and he could achieve it.

He had long wanted to give the gangs a fright, if for no other reason than that they had helped to massacre the Communists. Now that he was back, they were ignoring him. He would have preferred not to communicate with them via a woman if he didn’t have to, and at first he had thought Ch’i could not possibly know anyone in the gangs, but eventually he used her to send them a message: they were underestimating him and People’s Strength.

He had not yet settled on his next target, but he was considering either 181 Avenue Foch or 65 Gordon Road. Both were Western-style mansions with a lawn, a fence, a garage, guards, a complicated network of corridors, and police stations not a hundred meters away. The only difference was that Avenue Foch was near a French Concession police station, whereas Gordon Road was near an International Settlement police station.

“Avenue Foch,” Lin said.

Lin wanted revenge, Ku thought. He pictured vengefulness as a liquid that could be poured out into measuring cups. It would certainly be a justifiable target, as the owner of 181 Avenue Foch had been directly involved in the 1927 massacre of Communists. But he would have to consider it carefully, as the guards at Avenue Foch were far better armed.

That meant there would be a gunfight, a significant challenge for his squad. They could handle guns all right, and they would sometimes go to deserted beaches in Pu-tung to practice on scarecrows as they chewed and spat sorghum. Or they might rent a boat and take it out to sea, to use a few of the unlucky seagulls circling around Wu-sung-k’ou as target practice. But real fighting was about fear and conquering fear: could his people do that? By contrast, an assassination was a mere performance, like a mischievous practical joke. You strode up to the unlucky victim, took your gun out, pulled the trigger, and watched him collapse to the floor. Years ago, when he was involved in union activity, he had made his way through the outhouse to the factory yard, and dumped a sack of night soil on the foreman’s head. The foreman had been standing complacently at the factory gates with the protesting workers shut outside, fiddling with walnuts in his hand until night soil suddenly rained down on him, and he was humiliated. No one was afraid of him from that day onward, and all the stories of his cruelty evaporated.

In principle, an assassination, or even the grander operation he was planning, worked the same way as that sack of night soil. They toppled an old authority or source of fear, establishing a new one in its place. In the labor camps in Azerbaijan, he had spent days going back to these memories. The more he thought about this moment, the more significant it became for him. It proved that fear can unseat existing powers and install new ones. And by the time he escaped and made his way back to China across the Dzungarian Gate, he knew exactly what he would do.

JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

6:18 P.M.

Leng nearly ran headlong into a rickshaw, and stopped to catch her breath. She had altogether forgotten about calling Ku. If it weren’t for that man, she would already have made the call. In fact, this morning she had already been standing inside the telephone booth when he—

She finally remembered about making the phone call when it was growing dark.

She got to the candle store on Rue Palikao based on the directions Ku had given her over the phone. She hurried up the stairs, and as soon as he saw her, Ku asked: “Why didn’t you call?”

She had to admit she had panicked. It hadn’t occurred to her that in a city of a million people she would run into this man, the photojournalist. There was no way to explain it. And she had to tell Ku what she had learned.

What could she say in her defense? She should have called Ku right away and told him about the incident on Rue Amiral Bayle. Instead she had waited for the man at a pavilion in the Koukaza Gardens for hours, like a nervous lover, and gone with him to the White Russian restaurant. He was the journalist who had tried to take a photograph of her on the ship. He was enormously curious and remembered every face he saw. He liked pretending to be nonchalant. She trusted him instinctively, but she couldn’t explain why.

All those days alone in the apartment built across the alleyway had enervated her, as if she’d spent days lying in the afternoon sun. No one knew she existed, she thought, no one knew the part she had played in that assassination. Both her comrades and her enemies had abandoned her, almost as if they had plotted together to forget about her.

She told herself it was her duty to banter with him, to have dinner and flirt boldly with him. She had to find out who he was and what he wanted. For some reason, instead of telling Ku about their first encounter on the ship, she found herself telling him that Hsueh was an old acquaintance working as a photojournalist, a trustworthy and sympathetic man who only wanted to help.

But none of that mattered in comparison to what this Hsueh Wei-shih knew. He said he had close friends in the Concession Police, and he warned her not to return to the apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle. He had insider knowledge that the police suspected it of being a safe house for Communists, and once they knew the precise location, they would start making arrests there. His newspaper had been tipped off, and he had gone to Rue Amiral Bayle this morning together with the police, in pursuit of a scoop. He had recognized her right away, and wanted to warn her, but there was no time. The frisking on Rue Conty was an old police trick to draw out malefactors.

“And why would he share this intelligence with you?”

“He knew the police were looking for a woman. The minute he saw me, he put two and two together. He knew me, and he could guess from the newspapers that I had to have been involved in the Kin Lee Yuen operation.”

“And you admitted to it?”

“He didn’t believe that I could kill anyone — that I could really have been involved in the assassination of a counterrevolutionary army officer.” Strangely, she almost believed her own words. She had prevaricated to make her story simpler, but it was only getting more complicated. And she was surprised at herself for hiding their meeting on the ship from Ku. Was it because it sounded too unlikely, like a chance encounter invented by a romance novelist?